Friday, January 16, 2015

Spiders, webs and a model to help us deal with climate change

This large visitor to my garden built its web high over the back path last week but the web was not high enough as today I found the spider hanging from an inside door jam. Perhaps I brought him in on my hair.

Yesterday I heard a talk about another web, the inter-web, by lawyer Eben Moglen. It was an extraordinary talk about an extraordinary community, the one that has developed open source (free) software. The community has had to fight to retain its development model, a model which is open and transparent and the most efficient model for solving problems. They have had many enemies, people and companies who have felt threatened by this democratic model, but they have been successful in defending it.

It struck me as I listened that this is the model we will need to solve other intractable problems, like climate change. How fortunate we are to have a model that serves so well, and lucid people like Eben Moglen to talk about it.